Gosh Darn It! I Had The Dang Thing In Reverse!

Using the Buddhist terminology, we should begin with enlightenment and proceed to practice, and then to thinking. Usually thinking is rather self-centered. In our everyday life our thinking is ninety-nine percent self-centered: "Why do I have suffering? Why do I have trouble?" This kind of thinking is ninety-nine percent of our thinking. For example, when we start to study science or read a difficult sutra, we very soon become sleepy or drowsy. But we are always wide awake and very much interested in our self-centered thinking! But if enlightenment comes first, before thinking, before practice, your thinking and your practice will not be self-centered. By enlightenment I mean believing in nothing, believing in something which has no form or no color, which is ready to take form or color. This enlightenment is the immutable truth. It is on this original truth that our activity, our thinking, and our practice should be based. - Shunryu Suzuki

I have had it backwards for so long, but the above words are the key to the right way of action. At some point I intuited this, it is the only thing that really makes sense, but I kept washing back and forth. The way I proceeded before was to assume great labor had to be committed before the great treasure of the truth would reveal itself. But, all the mighty ones tell us this is not so. When the Buddha awoke under the boddhi tree he announced that he was surrounded by a world filled with enlightened beings. In his eyes all were already perfected. All of the great sages have echoed this realization, and despite years of study I did not take them at their word. I assumed that I was not a complete being and that I needed to take steps to earn that treasure.

Very silly. That attitude is an insult to spirit, and to the great sages. And, was a very self-centered distinction on my part indeed. Essentially it assumes I knew more than they! I came from a place of thinking I was better, more knowledgeable when it came to my own situation, than the Buddha was!

What the Buddha saw is what all of them saw. None of us are any better, or worse than any of us when it comes to being the truth. Each of us, at the core of us, the knowing that we are here, we are all the same.

The path is not to become that, but to embody that. To remain aware of that and work from that place. We each have the Buddha's eyes, and can look on the world with those eyes if we would have it so. Taking that as a central precept, we can make our life a practice. We can open more, and more to that truth and allow its realization to unfold us from the mistake that we are anything else than here.

Ramana Maharshi awoke to this intuition, this radical revealing of what is so, as a sixteen year old boy with no spiritual training. In a moment of being suddenly grasped by the fear of his imminent death, he choose to enter into that awareness instead of contracting from it, and sought the truth of what would really be lost in death. What he found was that in all circumstances, under all occasions, he was always absolutely sure if his own existence. He knew that he was. That wiped away all mistaken identity, and he taught the simple method of self-inquiry, being repeatedly aware of ones own simple being, for the rest of his life.

All the religious and spiritual paths come down to these few simple truths:

   1. All of our suffering is based on the fact that we misidentify ourselves.
   2. The only cure to that is coming to know what we truly are.
   3. The simplest method to do that is to look.

That is the enlightenment, and the practice. The thinking is the persistent looking, and the being of the realization revealed by this simple method.